I GOT JOCELYN Benson on the phone the day after last fall's midterms. I was expecting some exhaustion. It had been a long night of returns and a punishing election cycle, and I assumed that everyone was nursing the same kind of civic hangover I was. But the Michigan secretary of state was ebullient, still riding an adrenaline high from the night before. "Though we're in the middle of this multiyear effort, this is a significant victory that we never got to celebrate in 2020," Benson tells me. That year had also been a Democratic (and democratic) success: a high-turnout election, carried out in the chaos of a pandemic, that saw Joe Biden make Donald Trump a one-term president. But it was followed by weeks of challenges and frenzied protests, including an armed protest outside Benson's own home that December as she put up Christmas decorations with her young son.
Benson was sworn in to her second term in January after not only presiding over the highest-turnout midterm in her state's history, but also decisively beating Kristina Karamo, her Republican challenger, who'd made lies and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election the centerpiece of her political identity. Her win-and those of other Democrats hadn't exactly extinguished Trump's "big lie." But it seemed they'd managed to get it somewhat contained.
Observers had been bracing for a "tsunami" that would wash all manner of election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and pro-Trump radicals onto Capitol Hill, into statehouses and governor's mansions and positions of power over the democratic process. Some of them are, in fact, now in office. But the red "tsunami"? That never quite crested.
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Bu hikaye Vanity Fair US dergisinin February 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
Both Now Sides - Selena Gomez is seriously in loveand making the best work of her career. With the audacious Emilia Pérez hitting theaters and Only Murders in the Building returning to TV, the actor, singer, entrepreneur, and mental health advocate talks, about the climb
Selena Gomez is seriously in loveand making the best work of her career. With the audacious Emilia Pérez hitting theaters and Only Murders in the Building returning to TV, the actor, singer, entrepreneur, and mental health advocate talks, about the climb
Give and Let Give -Melinda French Gates is speaking out for the rights of women and girls, embracing her role as godmother to her fellow philanthropists, and getting political, even when it's a little uncomfortable.
Melinda French Gates is speaking out for the rights of women and girls, embracing her role as godmother to her fellow philanthropists, and getting political, even when it's a little uncomfortable.
Party Planning - Putin wants Trump to win, of course, and he's got big ideas about a new world order. Think Yalta-on Fiji
I don’t know which moment in US history former president Donald Trump imagines when he says, “Make America great again.” He has never given a definitive answer in any speech or interview. But I know exactly which moment Vladimir Putin imagines in his own vision for Russian greatness. It is February 1945, when Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill divided the world in Crimea.
Boys and Their Toys - Inside the hypermacho, Bible-thumping alt-tech universe trying to take on Silicon Valley-from El Segundo
For more than two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, California, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what they are building real shit—not like what the software engineers make up north, writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: They spend their workdays toiling in labs and manufacturing lines, their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds. Some are making drones to try to control the weather. Others are building nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight Russia and China.
Vanities - Maisy Stella knows how to think outside the box
Maisy Stella didn’t have a TV as a kid because her musician parents didn’t want her and her older sister, Lennon, tuning in and tuning out. So the girls used their imaginations. “My sister made a cardboardbox TV that I would get in, and she had a fake cardboard remote,” Stella says. “I’d do a baking show, and then she’d be like, ‘Soap opera!’ and I’d be like, ‘You killed my husband!’ We would do that for hours. That was our entertainment.” Only later, when the girls landed roles as Connie Britton’s children on the country music drama Nashville, did their mother and father relent. “We bought a TV the day that me and my sister got on TV.”
Another Country- Searching for James Baldwin in the South of France
Since James Baldwin's death nearly 40 years ago, the literary lion's final home, in the South of France, has drawn a procession of acolytes to the Provençal community of Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent the last 17 years of his life.The 300-year-old villa in which he resided no longer exists: By 2019 developers had converted the site into a luxury apartment complex. But that hasn't deterred generations of admirers, inflamed and enlightened by Baldwin's prose, from making a pilgrimage. Including me. Seizing the occasion of the writer's centennial year, I paid a visit in April. My first stop was a table at a Baldwin hangout, the Café de la Place on Place du Général de Gaulle, for a croque monsieur and a double espresso.
A House Divided
The Mellon dynasty has long been known for its old money refinement and discretion. But when TIM MELLON became Donald Trump's biggest donor many members of the family were mystified-and not afraid to talk about it
FUNNY BUSINESS
NEARLY 50 YEARS AGO, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE LAUNCHED A REVOLUTION THAT CHANGED COMEDY, TELEVISION, AND THE MOVIES. NOW DIRECTOR JASON REITMAN HAS RE-CREATED THE CHAOTIC HOURS BEFORE SNL'S FIRST EPISODE. LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S 1975!
BAD FAITH
From exiled actors to academics, influencers to intellectuals, VF gets under the hood of the Catholic right's celebrity conversion industrial complex
THE GE NERAL
How ELIZABETH PRELOGAR, America's low-key, high-powered solicitor general, is holding the Supreme Court's feet to the fire
